Automation Leads to Faster Decisions and Results

Posted October 17, 2019 by Ross Anderson in Streamline

Across all industries manual and repetitive tasks drain your overall productivity while reducing employee and customer satisfaction. Manual, repetitive work can limit your growth and ability to scale by increasing labor costs and the chance for errors.

Just think about how each person involved in the execution of work at your organization can make one tiny mistake. As an example, let's take a company that provides field services. Maybe an office staff person puts the wrong service code on an order—just one number off. A technician writes down the wrong time to be on location. These types of simple errors get compounded repeatedly. Your customers get frustrated, your employees get frustrated, and your company’s productivity suffers. We are not suggesting that your entire company needs to be replaced by robots, but software can be a useful tool to reduce manual tasks and allow employees to focus on more rewarding activities, ultimately benefiting everyone.

To see how your business can benefit from business automation, the first step is to explore the concept of toil. Google coined the term in their SRE division, providing an excellent definition usable outside of technology: "work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows."

Within an organization, toil the tedious work that drains the mental energy and enthusiasm of your employees. Identifying areas of toil can help remove steps in overly complicated workflows, remove errors in transcription, calculation, or decision making, and ultimately save employees energy for truly meaningful tasks. Many times a software solution can drive business automation.

When should software be applied to Business Automation?

If you are considering a digital transformation, consider areas within your organization where a large number of employees perform labor-intensive and repetitive tasks. This can even involve customer-facing roles such as sales and service as well as cross-functional teams collaborating on major projects.

Ideal use cases for process automation include:

  • Compiling data to make informed decisions
  • Executing contracts
  • Generating and distributing reports
  • Keeping CRM, ERP and other data in sync
  • Online order fulfillment
  • Optimizing routes for field service teams
  • Preparing quotes and invoices
  • Receiving payments
  • Scheduling appointments

Through automated workflows and processes, the number of people involved—and the time required—to reach the final result can be drastically reduced. But automation doesn't have to be a large project-even small automation can lead to significant time and cost savings.

For example, in a 10-person company, just one hour saved per employee per week will yield a 500-hour labor savings each year.

A Case Study for Custom BPO Solutions

Returning to our Field Service company example, software has the power to remove friction in even the most manual-based industries. By empowering your field service team to close out work without relying on your office staff you can shorten the workflow, enable faster data reconciliation, and delight customers with a more efficient service.

  • From the time of assignment through invoicing the job, all steps can be simplified or automated and work can easily be completed right from the field worker's mobile device.
  • Next, by implementing route optimization travel time is reduced and customers can be notified the day before of appointment times.
  • Add in quick trigger notifications and customers can be informed when the tech is on the way, improving the overall customer experience.
  • Other ways information can be gathered include photos and payment information embedded into the application as a whole.
  • With all of the information integrated and immediately available, reports can be auto-generated and distributed.

By focusing on the removal of manual processes and toil the whole experience is elevated.

Home services organization with 10 technicians

We helped a field-services company streamline their manual tasks, which ultimately impacted the bottom line. Here's an example of how we valued these process changes:

Paper Process Digital Transformation
Avg # of Daily Services 10 15
Avg Value of Service $250 $250
Annual Revenue $6.25M $9.38M
Post Service time to complete 24 hours 5 minutes

Annual Revenue Gain: $3.13 million

In this example, this field service company improved the number of services they could deliver per technician, reduced the down-time each technician had, reduced transcriptions errors, AND increased their revenue. All from implementing business process automation.

But this was just the impact on their field services. Then we can look at the effect on their internal office staff.

Paper Process Digital Process Time Reclaimed Each Week
Avg # of Daily Services 10 15 N/A
Time to Complete Each Service 15 minutes 2 minutes 10.8 hours
Data Collection/Management 10 hours < 10 minutes 10 hours
Report Generation 5 hours 5 minutes 5 hours

Total hours gained each week: ~25

The internal staff that support the technicians save 25 hours each week! That is a total of 250 hours a week the internal staff now has to focus on other activities. These indirect benefits of digital transformation allow your employees to focus on meaningful tasks that can't be automated, like customer support activities and satisfaction builders.

The result: Fast and easy decision making in a fraction of the time.

Where can software Automation help your business?

Vaporware can develop a completely custom field service app for your organization, or integrate with an existing CRM or another business system. What could your business do with more time and more efficiency?

Transform your company by automating manual tasks with proven and consistent processes through automated software. Learn more about our Streamline digital transformation services

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